In this paper we found that feral cats cover over 99.8% of Australia’s land area, including almost 80% of the area of our islands.

“Australia’s total feral cat population fluctuates between 2.1 million when times are lean, up to 6.3 million when widespread rain results in plenty of available prey,” explains the lead author Dr Sarah Legge from The University of Queensland.

Furthermore, cat densities were found to be the same both inside and outside conservation reserves, such as National Parks, showing that declaring protected areas alone is not enough to safeguard our native wildlife.

This paper has now become the most heavily ‘e-cited’ paper in the journal Biological Conservation.

The results provide little indication that cats responded numerically to the fox removal, but suggest that the fox affects some aspects of cat resource use. In particular, where foxes were removed cats increased their consumption of invertebrates and carrion, decreased their home range size and foraged more in open habitats.

The results suggest that fox control programs could lead to changes in the way that cats interact with co-occurring prey, and that some prey may become more vulnerable to cat predation in open habitats after foxes have been removed.